Ok, so yeah, made the happy announcement that I am tying now. My ingredients are limited to brown chenille and maribou, razor foam, olive thread, fly head cement, Gammy B10S #2 hooks… any other suggestions on beginner materials? Remember, I’m tying for warm water, so try to narrow it down to simple 3 or 4 more ingredients that I could use to tie a plethora of flies. Here is what I’m thinking:
LOL by the very nature of fly tying, your going to need a bigger house to store the stuff in… my advise is pick the flies you want to tie then buy the stuff, oh and stay away from thrift stores and craft stores one trip through either of those usually adds two or three items to my tying stuff. for what it is worth if I could only have one store bought supply (not counting hooks thread etc) I would buy peacock herl and scrounge the rest.
Eric
i agree with Eric “pick the flies you want to tie then buy the stuff”
although i dont use it as often as i probably should, pick up pheasant tail.
spoof
[QUOTE=adglife;452784]Ok, so yeah, made the happy announcement that I am tying now. My ingredients are limited to brown chenille and maribou, razor foam, olive thread, fly head cement, Gammy B10S #2 hooks… any other suggestions on beginner materials? Remember, I’m tying for warm water, so try to narrow it down to simple 3 or 4 more ingredients that I could use to tie a plethora of flies. Here is what I’m thinking:
I can send you some pheasant tail and some turkey feathers and a box of yarns. PM me your address.
If your warm water fishing includes bluegill, etc. you might consider a smaller hook than a #2 B10S.
I will also gladly send you some materials if you PM me your address.
Jim Smith
Well if you want to keep it simple, you could just get more of the same. Get some more marabou of a different color, strung hackle, and chenille or estaz, so you can tie a wide range of colors. As mentioned, some smaller hooks for panfish would be useful as well. You could keep yourself busy with just Woolly Buggers and Gurglers for quite some time with just what you have. Later perhaps some bucktail and lead dumbell eyes would be useful for Clousers and the like. As mentioned, the only way to keep this hobby affordable, is to limit yourself to a finite list of patterns and just buy for those patterns. Good luck.
Razor Foam is just that - thin. At least my Razor Foam is all 1mm & 1/2mm. Good for smaller trout patterns, not so good for warmwater bugs. Pick up some of the thicker foam in the craft stores/depts. Sometimes called “fun foam.” Joann’s has a pack of 40 (smaller) sheets in a dozen colors for $5.
Bass, bluegill and their fellow travelers like rubber legs. Add some rubber to your gurglers and dirty rats for more action. Tie up some Calcasieu Pig Boats. Two additional rubber-leggy patterns I’ve found work well are Yuk Bugs and Girdle Buggers. The Girdle Bug is a simple fly with three pairs of rubber legs tied along a chenille body. To make a Girdle Bugger, I add a short marabou tail and a marabou wing. You can them upside-down to reduce snags.
Another cheap find that has use in warmwater is bead chain. Your local hardware may sell this as ball chain or pull chain by the foot. Nice way to add bulging eyes to bream flies without creating a fast sink.
I always recommend a person start with a ?large? see through plastic box. We all know where this addiction ends. -----AA meetings
There are numerous sources of thicker foam 1/2" or better, flip flops one of the better know. With a 3/8" - 1/2" foam cylinder you can produce popper bodies with a rotary tool and an emery board. Some of the guys go to Harbor Freight and buy plug cutters, I use the shaft from a wrecked automatic umbrella.
You will lose every bug you make before you tear up the body, feathers, and legs can be replaced several times if you don’t leave it in a tree or a fish. Colored permanent makers, various shades of nail polish, if you have a teenage girl in the family get the bottles that are no longer cool to wear, the fish don’t know they are not cool.
If I could only choose a single fly tying material to use, it would be rabbit fur, It is so versatile, you can create dubbing, tailing materials, streamers, leeches, nymphs, crayfish immitations, etc. etc. etc. While I use it in all colors, black is my favorite expecially for warmwater fishing.
Jim Smith
Hi Adglife,
The advise you have gotten about only buying materials for what you plan to tie is vital to keeping tying affordable. I would further advise, to expand on what is said in that regard, that you think about what you plan to tie in the next two weeks to a month or so, and only buy the stuff for those things. Where you can get in trouble is buying stuff for the entire summers worth of tying.
Another way to think about it, is what flies do you fish the majority of the time, and tie those. Don’t try to get set up for tying all the patterns you fish, just the main ones first.
If you try to buy stuff for everything that you fish, even if it is fished only a small portion of the time, it can get very expensive very quickly. For the time being, it will likely be cheaper just to buy those flies that you fish just once in a while. That may sound like herasy on this bulletin board, but I assure you that it is true…been there…done that. (A whole bunch of the folks who post on this board have also “been there…done that” which is why so many of us are giving the advise to just buy material for what you plan to tie in the immediate future.)
For example, if you only fish dry flies like Wulffs, stimulators, and elk hair caddis once in a great while, just buy them for now. The fish usually are keying on a couple or three flies on those very rare ocassions when I fish for trout anyway, so it will be cheaper to buy a few of those specific flies than to buy hackle for while. Eventually you may want to get hackle, but in the short run hackle is very expensive stuff.
Also, what type of fish do you fish for? If you fish for bluegills, then craft foam in a few colors, and some #10 dry fly hooks, along with the rubber leg material you already have will keep you in foam spiders for a very long time. (You may want to spluge and get 3 or 4 colors of rubber leg material, and use those colors for all of your spiders…the fish won’t care if the legs on your foam spiders do not match the foam color. Still, when I was starting out I tried to use rubber leg material that was compatable with the foam. For example yellow rubber legs with chartreuse foam.) For bluegills, I use foam spiders, and small buggers or streamers more than anything else. I tie a lot of buggers without hackle, and only weight some of them. For weighting I have used lead wire, dumbell eyes of lead and of copper, small beads, and bead chain eyes. I don’t think it makes much difference at all what you use for weighting, but bead chain is the cheapest route to go. (More on that later.)
If you fish nymphs for bluegills a lot, a package of hares ear dubbing (or a hares mask), a small spool of copper color wire, strung peacock herl, a pheasant tail feather, and a goose wing feather or a turkey tail feather for wing cases will tie a lot of nymphs. You can tie gold ribbed hares ears and pheasant tails with these items. If you have a guy who works on computers at work, ask him to save a small transformer (and I do mean SMALL) off of a discarded board, I have several of them, and if you cut open a few you will almost certainly find the size copper wire you need.
If you are fishing for crappies and white bass, small streamers or buggers should work fine for you. For small sizes I use rabbit fur from zonker strips, colors of chartreuse, yellow, and white are the colors I use more than any others. If you go with bigger sizes, you will likely have to go with marabou, because rabbit fur length is pretty limited. That said, if you want to hold down the cost, you can skip the rabbit, and just buy marabou, as it will work fine for both larger and smaller sizes. It doesn’t last quite as long as the rabbit, but will last well enough that marabou is extremely popular, and the movement is great.
Thus, some small and medium chenille and some marabou in charteuse, yellow, and white will tie a lot of flies for crappie and white bass. (More on weighting them will be forthcoming.)
By the way, with your brown marabou and a little bit of brown floss for ribbing you can tie marabou damsel fly nymphs, which work well for gills after the damsel flies are around. You can even skip the floss ribbing, going with just the marabou, and do just as well I think. I tie them in olive, but brown is the other color usually listed. I usually tie them in #10s or #12s.
Take the butt section of a worn out tapered leader to make eyes for your marabou damsel nymphs. Make the eyes to look like bead chain or dumbell eyes. To do this, cut the heavy butt section into a piece about 3/8 or so long, and use a birthday candle to melt the ends back to form eyes. Black, olive, or brown mono might be better for eyes, but my experience has been that the fish like the ones I make from 50 lbs test colorless mono, or from the butt section of a leader, just fine.
If I had to just have one hook and size for bluegill fishing, it would be a #10 dry fly hook. I usually tie my bugger and streamer type patterns primarily on #10 and #12 3x long nymph hooks, and my foam spiders on #10 and #12 3x long dry fly hooks. However, when the actual fishing starts, I don’t think the fish will care at all if you tie all of them on a #10 dry fly hook. You will do just fine with that one hook size for all of those patterns.
For white bass and crappies, you might want some #4 or #6 hooks, but the last time I caught those type of fish I was using a small chartreuse marabou miss tied on a #10 hook, and did just fine. However, a larger size can be an advantage sometimes, my friends tell me. Again, the marabou miss is tied using only marabou (or for me rabbit in the smaller sizes) and chenille. I do weight some of them with either lead wire, a small bead, or with bead chain eyes, as was mentioned above.
If pressed, and you don’t even have to have chenille in the right color, you can tie a marabou miss, or bugger, using only marabou. I have, and they work fine. What you can do is use the fuzzy base section of the marabou feather to wrap the hook to make a chenille like body. The other option, using when only using marabou, is to make a dubbing loop using the fuzzy base of the marabou feather and the tying thread. Then wrap the hook shank with the dubbing loop of marabou and thread to make the body. This works great, and you end up with a more durable bugger than you get by only wrapping the fuzzy base of the marabou feather around the hook shank.
Now: Weighting buggers: For weighting buggers/steamers, you can buy a foot of bead chain, for use to make replacement light pulls, at the lumber yard or hardware store for a nominal price. Use diagonal cutters, tin snips, linemans pliars, etc., to trim the bead chain into pairs for the eyes. If you don’t have a set of any of those, I would almost bet that you have friends who do have them, of if you have a guy at work who works on computers, he will have them. A couple of sizes of bead chain, small for lightly weighting your buggers, and larger for fishing them deeper will be all you need. For what it’s worth, again, I use all of the mentioned types of weighting (lead wire, dumbell eyes, beads, and bead chain) my buggers, but if limited to only one type due to just starting out and cost, I would go with the bead chain.
I have also used lead and copper bumbell eyes, for weighting, as mentioned, and those are pretty nice to use, but they are a LOT more pricy than the bead chain, I don’t think they work any better, and again am certain that the fish do not care at all. We fly fishermen, and fly tiers, do a lot of things in our tying that please the eye of the fisherman, not because they necessarily catch more fish.
What’s the bottom line here? Well I guess I am recommending small (and medium if you want to tie larger sizes on the #4 or #6 hooks for crappie and white bass) chenille in white, yellow, and chartreuse; bead chain in small and medium size (pick out some that seems unlikely to corrode quickly…read that as the silver color), marabou in these same colors (and get some olive too…olive is my favorite color for tying), some copper wire, some hare’s mask dubbing, a pheasant tail feather, some strung peacock herl, and a goose secondary flight wing feather. You can tie a LOT of good bluegill and crappie flies with these. Also pick up a box of #10 dry fly hooks and a box of #4 or #6 wet flie hooks for crappie and white bass flies.
You might also consider some small olive chenille and orange rabbit stips for my favorite hackless bugger, one with an olive chinelle body and an orange tail.
Well, let us know what fish you mostly fish for, and you will get a lot more suggestions from the board members. My suggestions are for you IF you mainly fish for crappie, white bass, and bluegills.
You should also get some Dave’s fleximent for treating the back of the goose feather to use for wingcases.
One other thought. If you want to tie something using a different color than what you have, but do have white, sometimes you can use a sharpie of the desired color, and color the material to the color you need. It works fine with natual materials like rabbit or feathers. It also works on some synthetic materials, but not all.
Regards,
Gandolf
Deepcreek, those clear plastic boxes don’t have to be huge, but stackable is a really nice feature. 
That way you can find a quiet, cool, dark corner and run 'em up to the ceiling, as one’s hoard of materials increases.
For warm water work, I would get:
Some smaller hooks (i.e. sizes 6-12), Let me echo Gandolf’s comment about size 10 dry fly hooks being the first choice for bluegill. (In fact his whole post is excellent.)
Peacock herl
Mohair (leech) yarn in at least olive. Black, white, brown, orange, & yellow (probably in that order) are good colors for “later”, when the addiction has taken hold.
Hackle in the form of “bugger packs” for hackling woolly buggers, etc… Yellow and grizzly would be the two main colors to start with. Black and brown would be good later.
Marabou in red, yellow, and grizzly to start with. Check the hackles in your “bugger packs” and you might find some at the base of the feathers.
From there you might look at beads, bead-chain, for eyes and weight and wire for ribbing and weight.
Head cement is very useful. Fingernail polish is common. Sally Hansen’s Hard as Nail (SHHN) is the de facto choice of many tyers.
I’ll back away now, before I become responsible for leading you into fiscal indiscretions…
Warm regards,
Ed
I am glad someone mentioned Rabbit - I presume you mean rabbit zonker strips, or in fact a whole skin to make your own. As you say: dubbing, used in a dubbing loop or on the skin as a collar, stronger on WBs for the tail than marabou, can make bunny leeches, claws on crayfish (just a fancy WB), etc., etc. I would get natural brown. Inexpensive and very useful.
The only other item I do not see listed is some kind of tinsel or wire for shine and to add durability to dubbing and for attaching zonker strips. Broken earphones provide nice copper wire, or AT THE CRAFT STORE, embroidery tinsel/thread - several yards for only $2 or so.
You are correct to not get much stuff, it’s all about the variety of ways you can put it on a hook.
Great post
It may sound like a tedious waste of effort now but from over 60 years (yes 60) experience I can tell you that you will some day appreciate keeping things in their original packages or labeling them otherwise. Years from now after you invent the perfect fly, you’ll runout of material and wonder, “What was that stuff and wwhere did I get it?”. Welcome aboard.
I was thinking about this thread again today, and my response, and those of others as well. All answers were good, but most answered the question directly - ie. what materaials do you need. Some responded with the good answer: determine the flies you need an buy only materials for those flies/lures.
However, I have a more general thought, and I have fished warm water probably more hours than I have fished cool rivers.
You need a leech, a minnow, a ‘bug’ like a dragonfly nymph or drowned grasshopper sized item, and you need a surface floater like a small frog, or bee sized item or ???. So if you determine what size and colour you need for those 4, then you can make a selection that will work no matter what the day or conditions - or your mood. Cheers, Greg.
I’ve always had my best luck with poppers in warm water
Poppers with droppers are even better. (IMHO) Although I tend to fish foam hoppers more than poppers.